Recently started reading a sci-fi tale. 2 friends are flying a cargo run through space. Get attacked by raiders and crash on a planet inside a meteor shell in a nebula. They discover an ancient crashed ship which has an alien living in a crystal as the ship ai and this alien survives on emotion transfer.
Any idea what this story was called please?
I thought it had 'crystal' in the title but I can't find it. Perhaps it's been deleted. I seem to remember a single chapter in a 'to be continued' story.
AJ
I think https://storiesonline.net/n/32300/ship-s-interface would be a better link, yours may require premier membership.
may require premier membership.
No; the [More Info] links never required premiere to view, but used to require premiere to be shown - this changed when Lazeez made the search results personal to the person doing the search, presumably to replace database loading as a few of us would post search links to identify stories (requiring a database search per access, verses a simple page access for the more-info). This was (on my part, anyway) to prevent making followers of the link use up a daily access (of the then only 16 per day for basic members) just to read the description of the story.
Now that the access is not consumed until [Click for more] is clicked on a story page (and the access limit is higher, too), there is less need for using the [more info] link, but it's still valid, provides a little more info, and uses less bandwidth and site accesses than accessing the story then selecting [story details].
a planet inside a meteor shell in a nebula.
That's either a really small planet, or a really big meteor. :)
If you're going to get technical, a meteor is actually the visible passage of a naturally-occurring object as it enters Earth's atmosphere, so comets, meteorites, and asteroids can all cause meteors.
Of course, by that definition the original quote doesn't make sense, so I think we can agree that the author probably meant "a planet inside a rocky shell".
so I think we can agree that the author probably meant "a planet inside a rocky shell".
Actually, I think he may have meant that the 2 friends were inside the meteor shell when it crashed on the planet.
That's what would make the most sense to me.
But it's ambiguous as written with an amusing (to me) misinterpretation that I chose to point out.
Ah, okay, I just went back and read the original line and I think you're right. The sentence would have been better written as:
[The protagonists] get attacked by raiders, hide in a meteoroid shell, and crash on a planet inside a nebula.
The interpretation I arrived on after a mental somersault or two, was that, they arrived on a planet surround by an asteroid shell. Would have to consult the story for verification, but that's what made most sense to me. Even though the realism of physical existence of such shell around a planet may be questionable. I suppose a significant swarming of microsatellites could be viable as temporary stage after a major collision... and such temporary in cosmic timelines could be long lasting enough in human timeframes to be considered static feature.